Welcome to the class blog of Ben Villarreal's Freshman English 12 Course: Visual and Verbal Literacies! Here you'll find the thoughts, ideas, and burgeoning written work from our class about the multiple literacies we experience.

Pages

29 February 2012

Inventing? Understanding? What's the Difference?

How many people think Scott McCloud is a total fluke and is pretty much an evil genius? Dylan Horrocks definitely believes this. Dylan Horrocks is the author of "Inventing Comics," and is originall from England. "Inventing Comics," is basically an article about Scott McCloud’s Definition of Comics in McClouds work ,"Understanding Comics". Admiring McCloud for twisting his words and making people eat at the palm of his hand, Horrocks believes McCloud did such a great job inspiring readers that his book was so correct, but at times did not fully explain certain parts of the definition of comics.

In the beginning, Horrocks begins by nit picking at McClouds definition of a comic and begins to realize a common theme. This common theme was pulling an important word out of McCloud’s definition of a comic and then making the reader believe the definition McCloud feels it should be. For example, in Horrocks writing, “Inventing Comics,” he uses an example out of McCloud’s text, “Understanding Comics,” in which McCloud portrays the idea of having the dictionary definition of comics by having a panel of his own definition so it looks like the real definition. This simple picture does a huge thing. Being the genius McCloud is, he allows the reader to observe the picture and automatically assume it’s the dictionary definition because McCloud made it look as real as possible. Another main part of the comics definition is sequential art. According to Horrocks sequential art is such a huge factor because of how McCloud draws our attention to this powerful, unseen, magical, word closure. Not one in “Understanding Comics,” does McCloud explain why he feel sequential art should be seen as the main point about comics. Instead, he decides to hide a huge purpose of the book and take advantage of the reader by expecting the reader not to know much about comics.

Comics will never stop growing and will always have an infinity amount of definitions for as long as we all know but, Horrocks does not believe McCloud is informing us completely about all of the aspects about comics. McCloud goes throughout his whole book explaining his own definition of comics but disguising it all at the same time. Horrocks definitely agrees with McCloud for the most part but does not make it crystal clear that there are still problems with the definition. Not to mention McCloud stole the definition from Eisner, which in reality he only took Eisners idea, flip flop, and expanded it to be his own. How credible is that?

I give major props to Horrocks for calling McCloud out on the the things nobody else has. Although Horrocks agrees with a lot of the things McCloud has to say, he also was able to see what he was exactly doing. Tricking the reader into thinking all he was saying was proven and facts but in reality most of the book was McClouds opinions and own definition of comics. This journal was very important to read because you need to have many different perspective on this topics. Staying on a one path minded thought process will not allow you to learn the other sides of comics. Now, what do you believe?